Queen Mathilde attends women’s conference

[Jennifer]

Women's Day (8th March) is a very important day to remember all the great accomplishments we as women have and still make in society! Queen Mathilde has celebrated it well by presenting the Women Award for female entrepreneurs. Sadly, there are inequalities that still exist between men and women in the workplace. Some women are being paid significantly less than men who have the same positions as they do. Our society still values men as important over women. Some men think that women should only work as maids, housewives, or daycare workers. Being lawyers, doctors or engineers are just not "suitable" careers for us. Men just don't like it when we have the same jobs as them even if we are well educated or qualified.

Her Majesty Queen Mathilde of Belgium celebrated International Women's Day yesterday by presenting the Women Award, which honours 'a female independent entrepreneur who manages to combine her business, her personal life and a harmonious social engagement' at the KBC Auditorium in Brussels.

Queen Mathilde also awarded the biannual Womed Award South, which honours an enterprising woman from a developing country (this year's winner was from El Salvador) and gave a speech in both Dutch and Spanish.

She began by saying: 'Today we celebrate International Women's Day and we also bring tribute to female entrepreneurship. A symbolic opportunity to draw attention to the inequalities that still exist between men and women, including in the field of entrepreneurship. Female entrepreneurship contributes to the creation of new development opportunities, as well as to reducing social exclusion and strengthening social cohesion.'

Read more:
Queen Mathilde attends women?s conference – Royal Central

[Curryong]

^ I think rejecting women as lawyers, doctors, engineers etc is true of some, Jennifer, but they tend to be older males and in my experience there are fewer and fewer of these bigots around. In Australia it has been noted that men of a certain ethnicity are less accepting of women in authority but time and education will sort that out, I'm sure.

Certainly, most men under forty that I know totally accept women lawyers and doctors and consult them. There might well be less acceptance, within their profession, of women engineers. Every now and then an article in a magazine or newspaper here features a woman electrician or plumber as a novelty, but the women concerned are sub contractors and seem to be pretty cheerful about their acceptance by fellow workers on building sites! We're a fairly laid back nation in Oz. We don't really get riled up about much!

I read years ago about what female students in some British medical schools had to go through late in the 19th century from their male colleagues. Getting called names, sneered and laughed at, taunted, jostled,  as well as being virtually ignored by their Professors. These young men usually came from middleclass backgrounds and single sex 'good' schools, presumably brought up to be 'gentlemen' in the fullest sense of the word. Boy, we've come a long way since then!

There is still a hard glass ceiling in the business professions I believe. Too few women are heads of law firms or CEOs of giant corporations.

Some of this may be simple biology of course. If a woman is married and wants a family, unless she works up to the birth of children and returns immediately afterwards there is inevitably a break in professional life. Some women can manage it. For others it is a bar to reaching the top. Other women opt to spend some years with their young children.

At least now we women have the option. Even fifty years ago society was very different and that wasn't the case.